Supreme Court

November 15, 2013

Civil rights groups are applauding President Barack Obama's nomination Thursday night of Debo Adegbile, one of their own, to head the Department of Justice civil rights division.

"Debo Adegbile is one of the pre-eminent civil rights litigators of his generation," said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who led a telephone conference call today on the nomination. Henderson said he hopes and expects the Senate to confirm Adegbile for the position swiftly and with bipartisan support.

"We are absolutely thrilled that President Obama nominated one of our very own," said Leslie Proll, director of the Washington office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) where Adegbile worked for a decade.

Adegbile, 46, would be the fourth head of the civil rights division with LDF experience, following in the footsteps of Drew Days III, Deval Patrick and Bill Lann Lee. Sherrilyn Ifill, the current president and director counsel of the fund, said Adegbile is superbly qualified for the "critical work" of the division because of his "deep experience and understanding of civil rights litigation and civil rights law."

A relaxed and upbeat Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told the Federalist Society Thursday night that he feels “obligated” to state his sometimes unorthodox views of the law, even if they go against precedent.

“If you look like a fool, so what?” he said, adding that his respect for precedent is “not going to keep me from going to the Constitution.” His remarks won a standing ovation from the more than 1,300 attendees at the society’s annual dinner at D.C.’s Omni Shoreham Hotel.

Now in his 22nd year as a justice, Thomas said “I feel blessed every day” working as a justice. He even resisted the sentiment expressed by other justices that they need the summer recess to take a break from their colleagues. Thomas said he was in no hurry to leave the company of his fellow court members in the summer, prompting Justice Antonin Scalia to shout from the audience, “I get out of there as soon as I can.” Justice Samuel Alito Jr. also attended.

Thomas, 65, offered his observations during an on-stage conversation with Judge Diane Sykes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. She praised Thomas as a “steady and committed originalist,” and “a friend of the Federalist Society for so long.”

November 13, 2013

The Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a Sarbanes-Oxley Act case that business groups fear could expand whistleblower protection to employees of millions of small companies nationwide. Our coverage of the argument appeared in NLJ's subscription newsletter Supreme Court Brief.

In the newsletter we also reported on the high court's denial of review in a second abortion-related case from Oklahoma, and a petition in a Halliburton case involving securities fraud class actions. Our next edition, featuring a report on today's oral argument in an important labor case, will go out to subscribers later today.

November 11, 2013

The families of disabled children embroiled in an eight-year legal fight with the District of Columbia over special education services can move ahead with their claims, a Washington federal judge has ruled.

The Nov. 8
ruling revives a class action, first filed in 2005, that accused city officials of failing to identify young children eligible for special education services. The plaintiffs suffered a setback in April after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed the trial judge's certification of a class, undoing the judge's previous findings that the city was liable for violations of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act.

Back in the trial court, Senior Judge Royce Lamberth on Nov. 8 denied the city's request to dismiss the case. Lamberth certified four subclasses of plaintiffs in response to the D.C. Circuit’s ruling. The appeals court was concerned about a class made up of members with different types of claims.

For the second year in a row, Jones Day has hired six law clerks who worked for Supreme Court justices in the term just ended. "It's a wonderful kind of deja vu," hiring partner Beth Heifetz said.

As with last year, the six hires seems to exceed the number hired by any other firm from a class of 39 clerks--four for each sitting justice and one each for the three retired justices.

Heifetz declined to get into financial details, but said the hires were in line with the current market. That likely means that the firm paid the prevailing hiring bonus of $300,000 for Supreme Court clerks, for a total of $1.8 million, apart from salaries and benefits.

The firm hired two clerks who worked for Justice Samuel Alito Jr.--Emily Kennedy and Ryan Watson–-as well as Kenton Skarin and David Morrell, who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Charlotte Taylor, a clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Ian Samuel, who worked for Justice Antonin Scalia, round out the six.

The Abortion Docket: Senior Washington correspondent Marcia Coylereports: "In the past two years, anti-abortion groups have seeded state laws with abortion restrictions. Challengers to court rulings for and against those laws now are knocking on the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court."

Targets: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is taking on lawyers, filing more suits against attorneys almost more than any other group, Jenna Greene reports this week. "When the consumer agency opened its doors in July 2011, banks, mortgage companies and other lenders braced for lawsuits — and loudly complained about the new agency's powers. But lawyers were quiet, seemingly unaware that they, too, could find themselves in the CFPB's cross hairs," Greene writes.

The Bureau: Former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann talks with Andrew Ramonasabout the experience as one of the top government lawyers in the country. Weissmann, who's now teaching at New York University School of Law, discusses the challenges of building financial crimes cases, and he talks about surveillance and privacy.

November 08, 2013

Leading: "Harvard Law School sends more graduates per capita into corporate boardrooms and executive suites than any other law school," The National Law Journalreports today. Robert Anderson, an associate professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, reported the findings based on his assessment of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Recommended: Federal prosecutors in Boston are seeking a life sentence for James "Whitey" Bulger, convicted at trial on charges that included racketeering and money laundering, The Boston Globe reports. “There are no mitigating factors, and defendant Bulger has no redeeming qualities," prosecutors said. Read the government's sentencing memo here.

Argued:The Concord Monitor reports on a man's challenge over a controversial vanity license plate. "If the man formerly known as David Montenegro were to boil every complaint he has ever harbored for the New Hampshire state government into a cogent, seven-character sound bite, and then imprint that on the front and back of his car, it would be “COPSLIE,” the report says. The state Supreme Court is weighing the dispute.

November 07, 2013

It was a rare moment of surprise and drama Wednesday night inside the Supreme Court chamber. At the end of a Supreme Court Historical Society lecture on Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the landmark ruling on student free speech rights, the speaker announced that plaintiffs Mary Beth and John Tinker were in the audience.

The siblings stood and did not speak, but were greeted by a burst of applause from the several hundred spectators in recognition of their risky defense, at the height of the Vietnam War, of their First Amendment right to wear antiwar armbands as public school students. The high court's 1969 ruling famously declared that neither students nor teachers "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

The event was the last in a series of lectures sponsored by the society focusing on individual plaintiffs involved in landmark Supreme Court cases. Each lecture is hosted by a justice, and Wednesday night Justice Samuel Alito Jr. greeted the audience. It was an apt role for Alito, who invoked the Tinker ruling in a concurrence in the 2007 case Morse v. Frederick, cautioning against expanding restrictions on student speech.

Wednesday's Supreme Court arguments in the case Town of Greece v. Galloway were the focus of the latest edition of NLJ's Supreme Court Brief. It was an intense debate over when, and whether, the First Amendment allows prayer at legislative meetings. We also looked at the long history of the marshal's cry that opens Supreme Court sessions with words that include "God save the United States and this honorable court!"

We also covered arguments in a closely watched Mississippi case that examines the role that state attorneys general can play in class action litigation. The next edition will be sent to subscribers on Tuesday November 12 when the justices return to the bench for two more days of oral argument.

November 06, 2013

In our latest Supreme Court Brief, we focused on the high-drama arguments Tuesday in Bond v. United States, a challenge to the broad power of Congress to pass laws implementing treaties. Also in our newsletter on the high court is an interview with Alexander Wohl, author of a fascinating new book about the late Justice Tom Clark and his son Ramsey, the former attorney general. We also examined a circuit split over attorney fees in prison litigation that could make its way to the Supreme Court.

Today's edition, focusing on today's arguments in the church-state dispute Town of Greece v. Galloway, will go out to subscribers later in the day.